Introduction

Writers are frequently advised to be honest, to seek truth, and to convey that truth to their readers. Hearing this guidance many times in the early stages of writing this book, I thought, "Yes, yes, of course I'll be honest. I'm not going to lie." It seemed so obvious. And not just that, but also, "Yes, I do intend and hope to expose some deeper truth, something meaningful, significant, and ideally novel." Isn't that what we all want?

Then, I started thinking about my audience. Who are they? Potential future employers and employees? My peers? Former colleagues? Past acquaintances and schoolmates? My family? The general public? What would they like to hear? What will they think of me based on the things I write? If I express my true optimism and aspirations, will anyone believe I'm being genuine, or dismiss what I say as toxic positivity? Even though I'm not saying anything crazy, could someone take offense? Am I sufficiently aligned with the current trends in business, politics, and society, as they sway whimsically this way and that? How can I present myself in the best light, as seasoned but not cynical, as versatile yet deep, as fun and serious? Will my writing style be viewed as pretentious or convoluted? If I keep it casual and conversational, will it be viewed as simplistic? Are my approaches and explanations too technical to be generally accessible? What can I say that will be broadly appealing but also worthwhile? And on and on. Every thought I had, everything I wanted to express, and everything I wrote was haunted by these questions and by the uncertainty and insecurity that underlay them.

At first, I unwittingly relied on my internal manager to cope, allowing him to run free and do his worst. Any imagined objection was addressed through hedging, softening, positioning, and euphemism. By not saying anything directly or definitely, I was able to avoid saying anything that others might not agree with, that my future self might not agree with, that could provoke a reaction, that could be misinterpreted. Bit by bit, I ground and sanded and polished the diamond until it was indistinguishable from a common glass marble. The imperfections, the roughness, and the sharp points had been dealt with, but had taken with them the verve, the character, and any potential brilliance. The result was bland corporate mediocrity, not overtly dishonest, but also not expressing any meaningful, actionable, or insightful truth.

When the manager wasn't around, the engineer in me took over, considering, studying, abstracting, generalizing, and building grand, thorough frameworks. Every potential objection was encoded as another branch in the decision tree or another dimension of the space. By offering every possibility while endorsing none of them, I was able to avoid saying anything that others might not agree with, that my future self might not agree with, that could provoke a reaction, that could be misinterpreted. Diamonds were no longer diamonds, but instead just crystaline carbon, in the same family as graphite. They were gemstones just like rubies and emeralds. They were clear like glass and air. The result was bland technical mediocrity, so factual and complete, so simultaneously specific and general, that it offered nothing meaningful, actionable, or insightful.

After hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of words, I realized that individually, both the manager and engineer had led me astray. In trying to please the audience - some indistinct, varied collection of people, a cheerleader effect amalgum, a blurry composite, a demanding chimera, a different face in each flash of the strobe light - I had lost my way and I had lost myself. In trying to be everything to everyone, I had became nothing, losing all clarity and humanity, just like that blurry composite.

The truth is that I was afraid. I was afraid of striking out on my own, of what others might think, and of the possibility of failing. I had the experience, the ideas, the desire, and the considered confidence that I could do it, but I was hesitant. There wasn't really a manager and engineer, just techniques for protecting and obscuring myself. They hadn't lead me "astray"; I had hidden behind them. There wasn't really an audience, just my own doubts and fears. They weren't judging me; I was judging myself. Ironically, staying on the "safe" and familiar track, thinking too much about what others might think, and fearing failure had led me down a path of failure.

Not only had I written a bunch of shit, but it had been difficult and unpleasant to write as well. The food was awful and there was so little of it! For me, writing is hard, leading is hard, life is hard, everything is hard when I'm being untrue to myself or others, caught in an internally inconsistent system, racked with dissonance. I cared about what I was writing, but I didn't believe what I was saying.

The solution was obvious - but certainly not easy - and it had been there the whole time: I had to be honest, seek truth, and convey that truth. I had to break free of my fear and doubt in order to be true to myself, to be bold enough to say directly what I believed, and to shed the internal discord and disagreement that had burdened me.

Leadership is sometimes (perhaps often) viewed as a thing we just do at work, as a role we take on or even a role we play, as a contained and limited activity that's separate and different from the rest of our lives, as requiring peculiar ways of behaving, interacting, and speaking - an office argot, a corporate code switch, a professional patter of sly shibboleths, a commercial cant to counter the engineers' functional jargon - or as a costume and mask we put on not only to play the role, but to hide and protect our true selves.

While I don't advocate for bringing every aspect of ourselves to work, or for work to invade every aspect of our personal lives, a notion of leadership and professionalism rooted in this level of separation and disconnection is neutered, dishonest, and dehumanizing. These perverse enactments of leadership prevent us from realizing what leadership can be at its best, and what we can be as leaders at our best. These stilted, uncomfortable rituals separate us from our own humanity and from reality. These myopic visions obscure the fact that our personal variant of leadership is inextricably interconnected with our personal selves.

So much of leadership is based in our ideas, in our experiences, in our motivations, and ultimately in our worldview. As much as we may try to compartmentalize and categorize, who we are and what we believe unavoidably influences what we think, say, and do as leaders. In fact, it goes the other way as well: what we think, say, and do as leaders influences who we are and what we believe. Enacting the narrow, distorted vision of leadership described above has the potential to degrade us as people, while embodying a broad and benevolent conception of leadership has the potential to elevate and expand our abilities, our influence, our position, and ourselves.

Leadership is sometimes (perhaps often) viewed as useless or unnecessary overhead disconnected from real work and the real world, as a pretentious synonym for "management" (or even worse, "middle management"), as a necessary evil to be tolerated and endured by everyone involved, as a burden borne by the leader and those being led, or as inept, incompetent, or stupid. It's also sometimes (perhaps often) viewed as a system of structured indignity - of trickle-down abuse, recursive oppression, and hierarchical control - as a malevolant machine, as a vehicle for the vain, self-aggrandizing enrichment of those in charge, or as political, scheming, or even corrupt.

These cynical, hopeless, and dismissive views exist and persist because they're accurate assessments of the diminished and deviant forms of leadership that are common enough to be familiar. People in leadership roles, in positions of power, can be feckless, selfish, malevolant, or some kaleidoscopic, shifting permutation of any number of undesirable behaviors. Far more often, I think, people in leadership roles - including you and me - are generally well-intentioned, mildly self-interested, and moderately altruistic, but simply constrained. We're neither as effective nor as benevolent as we would like to be or could be. We're inhibited by the practical limitations of life - a lack of sufficient time, energy, patience, control, and even capability - by those around us, by exogenous factors and events, and by the organization at large. All of us are subject to the complexities and oddities that emerge from human organizations and human psychology, including our own.

While we should acknowledge this reality, we can't let the presence and even prevalence of these failings, shortcomings, and impediments dilute the true meaning of leadership, distract us from the true power and potential of leadership, or excuse us from the hard work and cognitive load of demonstrating true leadership.

Leadership is sometimes (perhaps often) viewed as a rarified privilege, as the realm of overambitious strivers or egotistical glad-handers, as unappealing (for all the negative reasons mentioned above), as a betrayal of the true art and craft of the profession, as reserved for a different type or class of people, as the snuffing, crushing black hole into which people inevitably fall when they give up or sell out, or as arcane and inaccessible.

These conceptions of leadership as exclusive and uninviting are not only alienating and divisive, but fundamentally false. They arise not from innate characteristics of leadership, but from bias, from bad experiences, from insecurity and ignorance, from unnecessary territorialism, and from contrived organizational and social structures. They do exist, but they aren't required or guaranteed.

I'm here to tell you that leadership is for everyone. It's available to everyone, it's beneficial for everyone, and it can be employed by everyone in personalized and manageable ways, whether big or small, loud or quiet, prosaic or poetic. In fact, I think leadership is inevitable. Anyone engaging earnestly and successfully with their work and team will unavoidably perform the actions of leadership and exhibit the characteristics of leadership, and will thereby be a leader or become a leader, perhaps even inadvertantly. The reserved engineer who leads by example and is able to effectively work with peers, guide an effort, and achieve a goal or complete a project is as much a leader - at their own scale and within their own scope - as the charasmatic executive who operates at a high level, deftly navigating the socio-organizational rapids, coordinating parties, and making big, impactful decisions.

At its core, leadership is the willingness to accept ownership and responsibility, the skills and knowledge necessary to effectively guide the effort, and the perseverance and grit to see a task through. In its best form, it flows naturally from a genuine desire to create something, achieve a goal, and make a change. It is accessible to anyone - regardless of title or seniority - but achievable only by those willing to set an ambitious target and work continuously and intelligently toward that goal. The need for leadership and the impact it has are universal and profound. It is the connective tissue that binds people, products, engineering, business, and all the other pieces into the gestalt of everything we have, use, and do.

Logical leadership is an aspirational, expansive, and pragmatic approach to leadership. Influenced by an engineering mindset, logical leadership benefits from rational analysis, structured conceptual models, intentional evaluation of options and tradeoffs, and technically-minded frameworks. But, far from being cold and mechanical, logical leadership applies the full range of tools, techniques, and perspectives - humanistic, psychological, social, organizational, financial, technical, etc - in logical and thoughtful ways to the work and challenges of leadership, themselves ranging from the the humanistic to the technical. Ultimately, logical leadership describes and promotes a worldview rooted in reality that seeks useful information and genuine understanding, allows for flexible and realistic applications, and serves real purposes in real situations in pursuit of real benefits.

In many ways, this is my story. Leadership and ownership have been the basis of my career and played an unexpectedly profound role in my life. Despite their ultimate importance for me, I initially came to them almost accidentally, stumbling over them on my way to other goals. I wanted to work with good people to make cool things, I wanted to pursue ambitious and impactful projects, I wanted to fix and improve things, and I wanted to achieve and succeed. I hesitantly, even grudgingly, came to see that not only the most effective path, but really the only viable path, was for me to accept responsibility and take the lead in pursuit of those things. Wanting and wishing is nice, but someone has to get things started, keep them going, and see them through to completion. If no one else is stepping up - and there rarely is - then that "someone" is you. In doing so in my work and life, I've come to see leadership as a necessity, difficult and strenuous, but full of vitality and possibility.

Just as leadership is for everyone, so too is this book. I can't guarantee that you'll like the style, that every idea will resonate with you, or that reading it will make you into a great leader. What I can say is that it's available to you and likely to be beneficial to you, just as leadership is available and beneficial, no matter if you're a reserved engineer, a charasmatic executive, or any other type of person at any point in their career or life. Even if you aren't a leader, even if you think you never want to be a leader, it's worth understanding what leadership is and the challenges and opportunities leaders encounter. Whoever you are, wherever you're at, you're welcome here!